Scheduling Strategies to Improve Reliability and Fairness for Priority Based Smart Rural Contention Based Applications Over Low-Cost Wireless Mesh Backbone Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are viewed as a cheap solution for telemetry networks in rural areas. The main advantages of WMNs are that they allow an easy extension of existing networks to service a wider area by using multi-hop wireless communication and they provide an alternate route when a route becomes faulty. Smart Rural Areas is a new concept for the development of rural areas. It is hypothesized that the Internet of Things (IoT) can help develop rural areas by providing better services resulting in poverty reduction. The widely used carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) was originally designed for Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) consisting of single-hop transmissions. CSMA/CA experiences a rapid decrease in performance when applied to multi-hop distributed networks as an increase in collisions and contention for the medium is experienced. The IEEE 802.11e standard provides data differentiation services for data of different priority levels with enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) being used in contention based networks. With EDCA, an unfairness problem exists where high priority data can starve lower priority data. To address these problems in low-cost rural smart networks we investigate the performance of six design schemes for wireless backbone networks by assigning different roles to edge and core routers. Simulations were carried out to obtain the results using OMNeT ++ and the INET framework. Simulation results show that hybrid network designs using distributed coordination function (DCF) and EDCA can improve QoS.